When Li Diudiu had wanted to mount the donkey and flee his pursuers, he dismounted to step forward and pay his respects — and in doing so, his feet made a very deft small movement.
He kicked the empty liquor flask and a length of blood-stained bandage into the grass behind him, disguising this as a slight stumble when dismounting from the donkey, and successfully deceived General Luo Geng and his son Luo Jing.
Were it otherwise, Luo Geng would not have said afterward that this youth seemed quite straightforward.
And it was just as well Li Diudiu hadn’t heard that remark, or he would probably have sincerely praised the general: General, what is it that both blinds your eyes and grants them such piercing acuity?
He waited until the several hundred riders thundered away, then with a somewhat petty air opened the money pouch Luo Geng had given him and looked inside. He sat cross-legged on the ground and counted very carefully — twice over — and found it contained fully fifty or sixty taels of silver.
Overjoyed. Utterly delighted.
Li Diudiu had no idea what a single warhorse was worth. If he had known, he probably wouldn’t have been so pleased — those twenty or thirty warhorses were worth far more than fifty or sixty taels of silver.
Earlier at the Yun Study Teahouse he had earned fifty or sixty taels; now he had another fifty or sixty; add to that his master’s hundred taels — wasn’t he quite close to being able to afford a proper residence?
He had more than a thousand taels’ worth of bank notes on his person. Had he at that moment thought of drawing out even a hundred from them, buying a residence would be essentially settled — yet Li Diudiu did not have the faintest such notion.
The pleasure of receiving silver put him in high spirits, and even Little Donkey now looked fine-featured and bright-eyed to Li Diudiu’s eyes — though moments ago there had been a brief impulse to eat it. In Li Diudiu’s imagination just then, the little donkey appeared as a gloriously delicious donkey-meat flatbread.
He mounted the little donkey, cracked the little whip, and the donkey trotted off light and swift as a gust of wind.
Li Diudiu felt that even the sound of the donkey’s hooves on the ground was pleasing. Life truly was like the outline of distant mountains — rising and falling.
At the same time, in Jizhou City.
Changmei the Daoist crawled out from a woodpile, looked around, and seeing the suspicious individuals had gone, patted the dust from his robe. He thought that the inn he’d been at before was probably no longer safe.
While sitting at his divination stall out front of the inn, his sharp eyes — honed over many years on the road — spotted from a great distance a group of men approaching with unmistakably ill intent. He had encountered every kind of situation in his many years of wandering, and his awareness of his surroundings had reached the level of the most cunning of old foxes.
So he hadn’t bothered packing up the divination stall — everything there was worthless anyway; the hundred-tael bank note was safe in his robe, and everything else he left behind.
He turned, entered the inn without a word, went straight through to the kitchen, climbed out through the kitchen window, and ran at full speed. After crossing two streets, he spotted a familiar place — the woodpile where he and Li Diudiu had once slept.
So Changmei the Daoist crawled in. He hadn’t long to wait before he heard a rush of hurried footsteps pass out front. He waited a good while longer and, hearing nothing more, emerged.
His first order of business was not to find somewhere to hole up, but rather to think that he ought to pay the Four Pages Academy a visit.
However, he dared not go in the daytime. First, he worried that going there might draw trouble to Li Diudiu. Second, he suspected that the area outside the Four Pages Academy might already have watchers stationed.
He had no one to turn to for help in Jizhou City, and before he knew the background of whoever was hunting him, he didn’t want to implicate anyone. After a moment’s thought, he decided to head toward Fengming Mountain.
That was the best hiding spot in all of Jizhou City — not a tall mountain, but the forest was dense. Though the Daoist abbey’s people kept watch at the path into the mountain, the old Daoist was confident that slipping quietly into the forest would pose no great difficulty for someone with his abilities.
Just as these thoughts settled and he prepared to leave, he suddenly heard a cold laugh from above.
“The tricks of a wandering mountain charlatan. A creeping, scheming wretch.”
These words gave Changmei such a start that he shuddered involuntarily. He looked toward the height and saw a young man sitting atop the wall behind him.
The man wore a snow-white long gown and held a folding fan. He appeared to be about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, with fine, handsome — if somewhat delicate — features, and in particular a complexion so pallid it was as if three catties of white flour had been rubbed on his face, while his lips were so red it looked as though he’d just drunk blood.
“Who are you?”
Changmei asked in a deliberately composed voice.
“My surname is Yao. A person who will do any job for anyone as long as they pay — that’s my promotional tagline, I came up with it myself. What do you think?”
The young man looked at Changmei and said: “Though I don’t know why you’re worth two hundred taels, since someone named that price, I came. For you, there is one piece of good news and one piece of bad news. Which would you like to hear?”
Changmei gave a bitter smile. “Who would want to hear the bad news first?”
The young man said: “The good news is that the person who hired me said you must be brought back alive. The bad news is… they said alive will do — they didn’t specify how much alive.”
Having said this, he dropped lightly from the high wall and walked toward Changmei. “I’m about seven steps from you right now. If you can offer more than two hundred taels, I can let you run for one hour.”
Changmei sighed to himself. What terrible timing.
So he turned and ran with all his might.
But he had only taken two or three steps when a searing agony tore through his back — as though something had ripped through his flesh and seized his spine directly.
Which was, in fact, precisely what had happened.
The young man caught up to Changmei in just two strides, reached forward with his left hand, and clamped five fingers around the flesh of Changmei’s upper back. With a single exertion of force, all five fingers sank in, gripping Changmei’s spinal bone in an iron hold.
With those five fingers locked around his spine, Changmei’s neck went stiff and straight, his eyes rolled back, and he could not move at all.
“See — so uncooperative.”
The young man said with some regret: “To keep you from running away again, I’m going to break your arms and legs now. Carrying you back will be a bit of an effort, but I can try asking whoever hired me to increase the payment.”
Changmei said with great difficulty: “No need for that. I’ll come with you willingly. I just want to know… cough, cough — who hired you to take me.”
“Answering questions costs one tael of silver per question. Fair price. Honest dealings, no cheating young or old.”
The young man smiled. “My name is Yao Wuhen. Yao Wuhen — honest dealings, no cheating young or old. Have you heard of me?”
Changmei: “No…”
The young man said: “That’s fine. I am a man with aspirations to become the world’s greatest assassin. You haven’t heard of me now, but in the future… damn, you’re about to die, so you probably won’t get to hear about me becoming the world’s greatest assassin after all.”
He actually seemed somewhat disappointed by this.
Changmei thought for a moment and then said: “I have a hundred-tael bank note in my robe. You just said that if I had more than two hundred taels you would let me run for one hour first — could a hundred taels earn me a half-hour head start?”
He had sensed that this young man called Yao Wuhen was not quite normal. A normal person wouldn’t have talked with him this much — so he simply wanted to test it.
Yao Wuhen actually released his grip immediately, and his manner of speaking grew more courteous.
“Once someone pays silver, they become a client. A client’s requests cannot go unheeded.”
Yao Wuhen extended his hand. “One hundred taels, half an hour — not one breath less, not one breath more. Honest dealings, no cheating young or old.”
Changmei turned to look at Yao Wuhen. He knew he was utterly no match for this young man, so without the slightest hesitation he drew out the hundred-tael bank note. Yao Wuhen received it, inspected it carefully, confirmed it was genuine, and nodded.
He leaped back up onto the wall and sat down, then drew a small sand-timer from his robe and placed it beside him.
“Half an hour. You may begin.”
The moment Changmei heard those words, he turned and sprinted. He was getting on in years, and the earlier pain in his spine still greatly affected him, so as he ran he veered to one side and crashed headfirst into the wall beside him.
Changmei bore the pain and kept running. This half hour was a matter of life and death.
Yao Wuhen sat atop the wall watching Changmei run into the distance. He was the kind of man who claimed honest dealings with young and old alike. Promises made without receiving payment could, of course, be ignored — but any promise made after receiving payment, he never broke.
The sand-timer flowed silently beside Yao Wuhen. He drew a paper packet from his robe and opened it with all the care one might give a precious treasure — inside was merely a half-eaten piece of flaky pastry.
Changmei ran and stumbled forward, not knowing where he could go. Though the other party hadn’t answered who had sent them, he could roughly guess it was someone from the official government, so he dared not go near any yamen.
He ran and ran, then suddenly looked up to see in the distance a stretch of high walls and gleaming roof tiles. He had never come to this part of the city before; his only thought was to head temporarily toward wherever more people might be — even a fierce assassin surely wouldn’t dare to seize someone in full public view.
In one breath he ran to the outer gate of that grand, high-walled courtyard, where several servants in blue robes and black boots stepped out to block his way.
“This is a prince’s residence — do not approach carelessly.”
“A prince’s residence?”
Changmei lifted his head to look, and at a glance read the large inscription beside the gate. In that instant, it was as though a drowning man had spotted a plank of wood drifting toward him. He dropped to his knees with a thud — no thought for dignity — he only wanted to live.
“Please do me the favor of conveying a message — I am an old acquaintance of His Highness. Someone is attempting to kill me. I beg His Highness to save my life.”
“An old acquaintance of His Highness?”
One of the servants looked him over — there was no real difficulty made, merely instructing him to wait at the gate, adding that if he truly was an acquaintance of His Highness, even standing at the very gate, no one would dare touch him.
With that, the servant turned and went inside. Changmei prayed inwardly without ceasing — Your Highness, Your Highness, though we have met but once, please come out and see me for even a moment.
He was overthinking it. Prince Yu was of such standing that even within his own residence he could not simply come out to see just anyone.
So when the servant returned and told him His Highness would not be coming out, Changmei felt the world grow considerably darker in an instant.
He had a wealth of experience from years on the road — but faced with an absolute gap in ability, all that experience might be worth less than dropping to his knees and begging.
“His Highness is within the residence and asks me to bring you inside.”
The servant could not understand why this Daoist wore such a look of despair — to him, wasn’t it perfectly natural for His Highness not to come out in person? Meanwhile, Changmei’s mind had been thrown into chaos, and his only thought had been that if His Highness didn’t come out, he was finished.
“Yes, yes, yes, of course…”
In that brief instant Changmei felt as though he had passed through fire and ice. He scrambled up and followed the servant in through the gates of the prince’s residence.
To the exact minute, a half-hour later, Yao Wuhen appeared at the gates of Prince Yu’s residence. No trace of anything could elude his eyes, so he had wasted not one breath in tracking Changmei here.
He looked up at the plaque reading “Prince Yu’s Residence” and thought to himself: now this is a bit troublesome.
But he did not fear trouble.
He had taken someone’s money, and he had to see the matter through — no matter how hard, it had to be done to the end. This was the most fundamental principle a true assassin ought to uphold.
Yao Wuhen reflected that he truly was a man of his word.
—